Bill Browder, an American-born financier, political activist, and well-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin says the only way to rein in the Kremlin’s reach in Ukraine is to suppress its financial means.
In an interview on CTV News Channel’s Power Play on Wednesday, Browder, who’s been advising the Canadian government and others on how to respond to Putin tactics, said the Russian leader is motivated exclusively by staying in power and won’t succumb to any level of negotiation.
“What we need to do is we need to bleed him dry. We need to make sure that he has no financial resources to execute this war. So when I’m talking to governments, I’m talking about how do we do a total economic embargo of Russia,” he said.
“We’ve achieved it to a certain extent but it’s definitely not a total economic embargo.”
Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and author or ‘Red Notice’ & ‘Freezing Order,’ has been personally targeted by Putin’s regime when he started exposing corruption in the companies he invested in in Russia.
His lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who testified against the Russian government, was detained without trial, tortured and later murdered while in a Moscow prison on Nov. 16, 2009.
Browder said he’s made it his life’s mission to “get justice for Sergei.”
Its led to the creation of the Magnitsky Act, legislation passed in a host of countries including the U.S. and Canada, that gives governments the ability to freeze the assets and ban the visas of international human rights abusers.
Asked how far Putin has gone since then to keep Browder quiet, he said “as far as he could possibly go.”
“I’ve been threatened with death, with kidnapping. They’ve issued eight Interpol arrest warrants to have me arrested. They’ve tried to have me extradited from the U.K. where I live. They’ve been suing me and making movies about me, chasing me around America,” he said.
“It’s been a full-time job just to try to be not destroyed.”
In terms of next steps governments could take against Russia as the war in Ukraine rages on, Browder listed a few options that would hit hard financially.
“We need to sanction a whole lot more oligarchs, we have disconnected 70 per cent of Russian banks from the SWIFT international banking centre, we need to disconnect 100 per cent of the banks. But the elephant in the room is oil and gas,” he said.
“It costs about a billion dollars a day for Putin to execute this war and every day, purchasers, mostly from Western Europe give Putin a billion dollars a day for his oil and gas. That has to stop.”
He said Canada and its allies can’t be concerned about the threat of Russian retaliation at this point in the game.
“The idea that we’re going to be tiptoeing around this guy because we’re afraid that he’s going to do worse things – he’s going to do worse things anyway. What we need to understand is that the one thing that will stop him from possibly doing worse things is showing him strength, he does respect strength,” he said.
Browder is also calling for a no-fly zone, which in the context of the war in Ukraine would be intended to help prevent Russian-backed airstrikes in the region.
The financier’s comments come the same day Russia slapped new sanctions on Canadian senators, adding to the list of foreign nationals banned from Russia.
